Untitled 1944

Arshile Gorky made this untitled painting sometime in the 1940s, using oil on canvas. It's a wild garden of form, built up with thin washes and wiry lines, a kind of dance between accident and intention. Look at the way Gorky lets the paint drip and stain, especially at the bottom. It's almost like he's inviting the canvas to participate, letting the material itself have a say. You get a sense of process, of searching. The colors are muted, almost ghostly. There’s a play between the solid black dot, and the translucent reds and yellows around it. It feels like seeing something emerge from a dream. Gorky reminds me of another painter, Francis Picabia, who liked to play with a similar sense of ambiguity, and whose work also occupied a space between abstraction and figuration. Neither of them were ever pinned down for long. Art, after all, is a conversation across time, an ongoing invitation to see the world anew.